The status of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has been inflated – to an extent that he has been designated as the frontrunner for the 2016 GOP presidential primary. Paul’s views on national security and foreign policy remain the distinct minority within Republican Party. Paul has emerged, however, as a legitimate first-tier candidate unwise to underestimate.

His domestic views resonate powerfully with Tea Party Conservatives. Paul has offered the clearest, most consistent alternative to the hawkish conservatism still popular among a sizable majority of Republicans. He sounds temperate, not incendiary, avoiding the morally and geopolitically indefensible positions of his father Ron Paul and paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, unrepentant opponents of American intervention in World War II.

Recently, Paul has attained prominence for opposing American intervention in Syria, drone strikes, National Security Agency surveillance measures and general humanitarian interventions. He has criticized evangelical Christians for their attachment to Israel and their support for preemptive war. “It’s hard to square the idea of a preemptive war and, to me, that overeagerness [to go to] war, with Christianity,” Paul told McKay Coppins.

Paul exudes a neuralgic aversion to neoconservatives, blaming them for the Iraq War and accusing them of misappropriating Reagan’s legacy. Speaking at the Heritage Foundation earlier this year, Paul identifies himself a “foreign policy realist,” in the tradition of George F. Kennan and Ronald Reagan.

Consider Reagan’s actual record rather than Paul’s distortion of it. Even before World War II, Ronald Reagan extolled American exceptionalism and muscular internationalism, frequently denouncing appeasement of Hitler as “a suicidal dogma.” Reagan said of World War II that “never in the history of man has the issue of right and wrong been so clearly defined, so much so that it makes one question how anyone could have remained neutral.” Unlike the Old Republican right of Robert Taft then and Pat Buchanan now, Reagan revered Winston Churchill – the archenemy of appeasement and proponent of fighting Nazi Germany sooner rather than later – for doing more than “any man to preserve civilization during its hour of greatest trial.”

Nor did Reagan share Rand Paul’s ambivalence about evangelical Christians’ unwavering support for Israel. “No conviction I have ever held has been stronger than that the United States must ensure the survival of Israel,” Reagan wrote in his memoir, “An American Life.”

Reagan also disagreed sharply with Paul’s more relaxed views about Islamic radicalism, nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and the dangers of a nuclear Iran. “I don't think you can overstate the importance that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism will have to the rest of the world in the century ahead,” he wrote.

Although Ronald Reagan abstained from the unbridled democratic globalism of some but hardly all neoconservatives, he found much congenial in the neoconservatism that Rand Paul excoriates.

Reagan and the neoconservatives emphasized the importance of ideology and regime type in discerning friends and foes. Reagan and the neoconservatives preferred a stable liberal democratic outcome when the United States could achieve it prudently. Reagan and foreign policy hawks of all varieties opposed strategic retrenchment or cutting the defense spending at the expense of sustaining American global leadership. Unlike Rand Paul, Reagan championed American military preeminence and resolution to use American power as indispensable for deterring and defeating threats to America’s vital interests in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

Reagan also rejected Rand Paul’s near categorical aversion to the doctrine of preemption. Unlike Paul, he recognized that the strategies of containment and deterrence would not suffice in all circumstances.

Whether, where and when the United States used force depended for Reagan on the adversary’s capabilities, propensity for risk and the availability of plausible diplomatic alternatives.

Like foreign policy hawks of all varieties, Reagan defended the preemptive use of force against certain types of gathering dangers for reasons his hero Churchill conveys. “If you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly … you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.”

Do Republicans want a leader who espouses or forsakes a neo-Reaganite foreign policy? Count this as one vote for the neo-Reaganites and against the anti-Reaganite Rand Paul.

Robert G. Kaufman is a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University.

WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Letters to the Editor: E-mail to letters@ocregister.com.
Please provide your name, city and telephone number (telephone numbers will not be published).
Letters of about 200 words or videos of 30-seconds
each will be given preference. Letters will be edited for length, grammar and clarity.

User Agreement

Keep it civil and stay on topic. No profanity, vulgarity, racial
slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about
tragedies will be blocked. By posting your comment, you agree to
allow Orange County Register Communications, Inc. the right to
republish your name and comment in additional Register publications
without any notification or payment.